Technology

Another article written by a person who doesn't realize that human intelligence is 100% about predicting sequences of things (including words), and therefore has only the most nebulous idea of how to tell the difference between an LLM and a person.

The result is a lot of uninformed flailing and some pithy statements. You can predict how the article is going to go just from the headline because it's the same article you already read countless times.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure.

May as well have written "Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrr brghlgbhfblrghl." It didn't even occur to the author to ask, "what is thinking? what is reasoning?" The point was to write another junk article to get ad views. There is nothing of substance in it.

The machinery needed for human thought is certainly a part of AI. At most you can only claim its not intelligent because intelligence is a specifically human trait.

As someone who's had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn't or, particularly, can't be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don't have kids. The other side usually does.

When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend's dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.

And as funny as it would be to argue that they're both sapient, but not sentient, I don't think that's the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I'd love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.